Wednesday, January 17, 2018

The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World Is Watching.

I read an interesting article about Rotterdam and the Netherlands in the New York Times of which I will copy the first paragraphs below. I read it because of a a conversation I had with the director corporate strategy of the Port of Rotterdam. In preparing the interview I read a couple of articles and power point presentations about Rotterdam and the Paris Climate Agreement. Very interesting stuff!

In the waterlogged Netherlands, climate
change is considered neither a hypothetical nor a drag on the economy.
Instead, it’s an opportunity.

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — The wind over the
canal stirred up whitecaps and rattled cafe umbrellas. Rowers strained
toward a finish line and spectators hugged the shore. Henk Ovink,
hawkish, wiry, head shaved, watched from a V.I.P. deck, one eye on the
boats, the other, as usual, on his phone.

Mr. Ovink is the country’s globe-trotting
salesman in chief for Dutch expertise on rising water and climate
change. Like cheese in France or cars in Germany, climate change is a
business in the Netherlands. Month in, month out, delegations from as
far away as Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, New York and New Orleans make the
rounds in the port city of Rotterdam. They often end up hiring Dutch
firms, which dominate the global market in high-tech engineering and
water management.

That’s because from the first moment settlers
in this small nation started pumping water to clear land for farms and
houses, water has been the central, existential fact of life in the
Netherlands, a daily matter of survival and national identity. No place
in Europe is under greater threat than this waterlogged country on the
edge of the Continent. Much of the nation sits below sea level and is
gradually sinking. Now climate change brings the prospect of rising
tides and fiercer storms.

From a Dutch mind-set, climate change is not a hypothetical or a drag on
the economy, but an opportunity. While the Trump administration
withdraws from the Paris accord, the Dutch are pioneering a singular way
forward.

It is, in essence, to let water in, where possible,
not hope to subdue Mother Nature: to live with the water, rather than
struggle to defeat it. The Dutch devise lakes, garages, parks and plazas
that are a boon to daily life but also double as enormous reservoirs
for when the seas and rivers spill over. You may wish to pretend that
rising seas are a hoax perpetrated by scientists and a gullible news
media. Or you can build barriers galore. But in the end, neither will
provide adequate defense, the Dutch say.

And what holds true for managing climate change
applies to the social fabric, too. Environmental and social resilience
should go hand in hand, officials here believe, improving neighborhoods,
spreading equity and taming water during catastrophes. Climate
adaptation, if addressed head-on and properly, ought to yield a
stronger, richer state.

This is the message the Dutch have been taking
out into the world. Dutch consultants advising the Bangladeshi
authorities about emergency shelters and evacuation routes recently
helped reduce the numbers of deaths suffered in recent floods to
“hundreds instead of thousands,” according to Mr. Ovink.

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” he said. “You
can say we are marketing our expertise, but thousands of people die
every year because of rising water, and the world is failing
collectively to deal with the crisis, losing money and lives.” He ticks
off the latest findings: 2016 was the warmest year on record; global sea
levels rose to new highs.

Rowing teams practice at the Eendragtspolder, a site intended to be both a public amenity and a reservoir for floodwater.

He proudly shows off the new rowing course just
outside Rotterdam, where the World Rowing Championships were staged
last summer. The course forms part of an area called the
Eendragtspolder, a 22-acre patchwork of reclaimed fields and canals — a
prime example of a site built as a public amenity that collects
floodwater in emergencies. It is near the lowest point in the
Netherlands, about 20 feet below sea level. With its bike paths and
water sports, the Eendragtspolder has become a popular retreat. Now it
also serves as a reservoir for the Rotte River Basin when the nearby
Rhine overflows, which, because of climate change, it’s expected to do
every decade.

Interested in keeping up with climate change?

Sign up to receive our in-depth journalism about climate change around the world.

The project is among dozens in a nationwide
program, years in the making, called Room for the River, which
overturned centuries-old strategies of seizing territory from rivers and
canals to build dams and dikes. The Netherlands effectively occupies
the gutter of Europe, a lowlands bounded on one end by the North Sea,
into which immense rivers like the Rhine and the Meuse flow from
Germany, Belgium and France. Dutch thinking changed after floods forced
hundreds of thousands to evacuate during the 1990s. The floods “were a
wake-up call to give back to the rivers some of the room we had taken,”
as Harold van Waveren, a senior government adviser, recently explained.

“We can’t just keep building higher levees,
because we will end up living behind 10-meter walls,” he said. “We need
to give the rivers more places to flow. Protection against climate
change is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and the chain
in our case includes not just the big gates and dams at the sea but a
whole philosophy of spatial planning, crisis management, children’s
education, online apps and public spaces.” TO READ FURTHER, click HERE

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org